Day 22: The Elusive Cookie

Coffee cookies and I have long been playing a game of running and catching.

You see, there is this airline that sells a range of cookies in their on-flight cafeteria, which includes coffee cookies. And every time I fly by that airline I ask for a tin of the coffee cookies thinking ‘Ahh, this time I shall finally try them!’ but every time the coveted cookies manage to elude me by being “out of stock”.

After about the third time I decided that if they wanted to play so hard to get, I would stop chasing. I could just bake some for myself, and a whole batch at that! So it was decided, and coffee cookies became one more bullet point on my list of ‘things to make one day’. But they didn’t get much further than that for a long while.

Finally today I decided to break out the ol’ oven mitts and bake me a batch.

I had a very specific idea of what I wanted them to be like. A robust coffee flavor - nothing mild and namby-pamby, and a crisp texture. I wanted them to be more like crunchy biscuits than chewy cookies. So I explored the glorious world-wide-web with various combinations of keywords but none of the recipes seemed like ‘the one’. The representative photographs in all of them seemed to show cookies that lacked the snap and crunch I was looking for (I know, not the most accurate way to valuate a recipe). But then I found a page that attempted to break down the sciences of cookie-crunch and cookie-chew, based on ingredients – all-purpose flour creates a crispy cookie, butter contains protein, which aids crisping, recipes without egg yield crisper cookies… and so on.

And what this information told me was that a basic shortbread recipe was my best bet. But I didn’t want coffee flavored shortbread – not something quite so short and with such a fine crumb.

So I used the basic principles from the web page and just winged it from there. Basic shortbread recipe but with a 3:1 flour to butter ratio, as opposed to 2:1 for a less short end product – larger crumb. And to this I added one egg white. Without the fat of the egg-yolk the moisture that creates a chewy soft cookie would be eliminated and the protein of the egg white should technically have made it crisp. (That’s what seems to happen in meringues and macaroons, right?). It all sounded great in principle.

But it seems I was missing something, because while the cookies looked and tasted great, they were still kind of chewy in the center, and the overall texture and crumb was that of the average firm but cakey chocolate chip cookie…

So what IS it that creates a crisp cookie that breaks with a lovely snap and crunches audibly when chewed? Guess the search for the right recipe is still on.
Any recommendations?